After spending the last decade redefining rock music, all Brian Eno wants
now is an honest job of work and a place to lay his head. Hand in hand, he and
Richard Williams wade through the Mire of Options.

One day, perhaps after the heat-death of the universe, historians may find a
small pile of black-bound notebooks filled with graphs, calculations, epigrams
and helpful suggestions, all inscribed with a fine-nibbed pen in a careful hand.
The notebooks of Brian Eno will tell them, if they're interested, a great deal
about rock music in the 1970s.

Brian Eno is, without question, the music's foremost theoretician. In the
eight and a half years since his name first appeared in this paper, he has
assisted the work of any other artists in this capacity: some of them are Bryan
Ferry, David Bowie, Robert Fripp, John Cale, Talking Heads, Devo, Cluster,
Robert Wyatt and Ultravox. The list of those who have been influenced by his
strategies is enormous and would include Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, Throbbing
Gristle, James Chance...

Many of those outside the art-rock field still consider Brian En to be a
dilettante, an élitist, an inventor of concepts, lacking conventional
intgrity. They ignore the fact that his theories of the genetic structure of
music apply equally well to heavy metal or R&B (or to painting or dance,
come to that).

On April 23, 1978, Brian Eno flew to New York. He
planned to master Talking Heads' second album, More Songs About Buildings
and Food, at a cutting-room in the city, and to finish a chapter for a book
of essays being edited by his acquaintance Stafford Beer, the cybernetician. It
was his intention to leave New York within three weeks by his birthday, May 15.

Seven months later he was still there, having been seduced into staying by
the vigour of the local art-scene and also (it must be admitted) by the way that
scene's members feted him.

On Christmas Day, 1978, he flew to South East Asia. Arriving in Bangkok,
capital of Thailand, he checked into a hotel. He planned to stay there for
several months, hoping to sort out his tactics for the future. The following
story came from Phil Manzanera at the beginning of 1979, when Eno was still in
Thailand:

"On Brian's first evening in Bangkok, he left
his hotel for a stroll around the town. It happened that his hotel was on the
edge of the red-light district, so naturally Brian wandered into it. He passed
several bars, and through the open doors he could see many girls sitting around
the edges of the rooms. When he came to the third or fourth, he looked in
through the door and, beyond the girls, at the end of the bar, he saw a disc
jockey playing records. Above the disc jockey, pinned to the wall, was the
sleeve of For Your Pleasure, Roxy Music's second album. Of course, Brian
went in and tried to talk to the deejay, who was Thai and didn't understand when
Brian tried to explain that he was on the record pinned above the man's head.
Brian was just about to walk off when another man suddenly appeared from behind
the deejay's desk - he'd been kneeling on the floor, mending the amplifier. The
second man recognised Brian immediately - it turned out that he was German, and
had been a big fan of Roxy. He'd seen them every time they'd played in Germany.
He owned the bar... and the girls. When he discovered that Brian was staying in
an hotel, he invited him to come and stay with him instead in his apartment
above the bar. So Brian checked out of the hotel and moved in with the German...
and his girls. A few weeks later, the German told Brian that he owned another,
similar place, up in the mountains and he was going up there for a while. Would
Brian like to go there with him? So Brian spent the rest of his weeks in
Thailand in this man's establishment in the mountains. Board, lodging and girls,
all free. Typical, isn't it?"

In April, 1979, Eno returned to New York, having failed to resolve his
future. He produced the third Talking Heads album, Fear Of Music,
embarked on several albums for his Ambient Music label, started recording some
music of his own, and began working with videotape. In October he returned
briefly to England, seeing friends an doing some recording. The following month
he went to New York and, on New Year's Eve 1979, at the turn of the decade, he
flew to California, to an unspecified address, planning to spend the year there.

The following conversation took place during his most recent stay in London.

I thought we might start by talking about why you went to America to
live in the first place. I was trying to remember if you went first, or if
Robert Fripp went first.

"It was Robert, but I don't know if he committed himself to living
there at the time. He did much the same us me: he went there just for a little
time, initially, and he ended up staying. I went there to do a couple of
specific things, and I thought if I go back to London I'll get distracted, so
I'll just find a place here for a month. But it turned out that I happened to be
in New York during one of the most exciting months of the decade, I should
think, in terms of music - it seemed like there were 500 new bands who all
started that month.

"The first thing that really impressed me was that within two weeks I
already knew and was having conversations with really interesting people... a
lot of creeps, too, but the opportunities for meeting people are infinitely
larger than they are here. And for meeting a really wide range of people.

"Another thing is that people are just much more willing to talk to one
another, because everyone is desperate for an idea. People really regard it as
important that they should find out what everyone else is doing, and surely part
of the reason is that they want to incorporate whatever they can into their own
work. That seems to me to be quite healthy, as opposed to the English situation,
which has tended to be... there's the new wave scene, and the theatre scene, and
the modern dance scene, and you never get any real collisions between them,
except rather contrived ones."

That inter-disciplinary activity must be very interesting for you.

"Well, what's interesting about those kind of conversations is that
they're very rarely on the level of talks that musicians have between
themselves. If you meet a bunch of other rock musicians, what do you talk about?
guitars, tuning... you talk about things to do with the craft of what you're
doing.

"Now if you meet a dancer, for instance, that's not going to be of any
interest to him, just as the technicalities of dance aren't going to be of much
interest to me. So you tend automatically to slip into another level. You either
just chat, social chat, or else you're talking about something to do with why
you do what you do, what the inspiration is behind it. And, for me, that kind of
conversation is much more interesting. Talking about tools doesn't interest me,
really."

VIDEO

What do you think you've got out of it, beyond the enjoyment of
talking to a lot of people who do different things?

"First of all, I got a lot of encouragement... much more than I've ever
got here. Now that cuts both ways, because encouragement is always encouragement
to carry on with what you're doing. It's not usually encouragement to do
something that you can't explain, or that you only have a vague feeling about.
But, on the other hand, it is very nice to be encouraged. It's really nice to be
in a situation where people are actually interested... not only interested, but
influenced by what you do. So you can see extensions of your own work carried
out much more thoroughly, vague ideas in things I'd done being approached much
more rigorously.

"The negative side, which I think will turn out to be positive is that
having seen that done, I thought 'I don't really want to do this any more, it's
superfluous now.' And so it really started a kind of feeling for me, which is
getting stronger, which is that I don't want to make rock records any more. By
that, I mean I don't want to follow the format I've used in the past, which is
writing songs and working in a particular way with regard to studios and so on.
There are lots of people doing it, and doing it very well, and consequently that
territory is covered.

"So what started me off thinking about that was... well, New York's a
great place for having ambitious ideas because they all look feasible there. As
soon as you come back here, they suddenly look impossible. But there, for
instance, you can actually start thinking about Music For Airports as a
real idea, and the idea of getting it into airports looks possible. Whether it
is or not is yet to be seen, but people manage to do such extraordinarily
complex things there that immediately the bounds of possibility are set further
away.

"For instance, I started doing videos. I just
bought a video colour camera and a recorder, nothing special, sort of 'your
first video kit', and I thought, this looks interesting, I'm just going to
fiddle around with it for a bit'... because I was moving towards thinking about
videodiscs. So I thought that if I ever did get to make one, rather than
surrendering it all to somebody else, I'd like to know what was going on. In
fact I'd like to make it myself.

"So I started tinkering about with it, in much the same way that I
tinkered around with synthesizers at first, with a real feeling of fun - you
know. 'Oh, this is really lovely, all these beautiful colours' and within two
weeks I had my first video exhibition. And I wasn't working to attract that. Now
you can't really conceive of that in this country somehow, can you?

"The exhibition was kind of flawed in a way, it was just like
somebody's first attempt, but at the same time, to have it exposed as quickly as
that was very useful to me, because I knew that two weeks later I'd have been
saying, oh, that's child's play, I'm going to do something much more
interesting.' But actually having that child's play exhibited, and seeing that
it really did look nice, made me take it much more seriously, so now I've
retained some of that child-like attitude to making videos.

"Most video art that I've seen is so defensive... it's determined, for
instance, not to be seduced by the medium, so it's really grim. Even black and
white... you know, the refusal to use colour because it's too seductive. It has
this kind of Teutonic seriousness about it that I don't like very much, and it
struck me as refreshing to see something that was done by somebody who'd
obviously been seduced by the medium and wasn't too embarrassed by it."

LEAVE ME ALONE

You wrote from New York in 1978 that the momentum of
success there can be dangerous.

"Very much so. That's why I keep getting out again. New York is so
energetic and self-contained that it's easy to forget that the rest of the world
exists. So there are a lot of artists in New York who work only in terms of that
situation, and hose work outside of that context is really not interesting. The
danger is that you hurdle along on a path that seems to be getting wider, but is
actually narrowing. The other danger is simply that of getting big-headed, of
thinking, 'Oh, I can do anything... I'm real smart, they like me.'"

You must have been pretty much lionised when you got there.

"Oh, very much. And you notice it there because people tend to come up
and talk to you without introductions or anything like that."

Part of you would enjoy that...

"Oh, yes. It's very flattering. The particularly good part was that
other artists come up and start talking. In England, I often have this feeling
that there's a real pride among artists... it's almost like the boy/girl
situation, 'I'm not going to talk to you first.' As if it demeans you to go and
say to someone that you really like their work. In fact, the times that I've
done that in England, it's really taken people by surprise.

"But the problem is that there's a kind of filtering operation, which
is the inverse of the way you'd want it to work: if you're a celebrity and
you're getting no end of hassle, the people who're actually interesting tend to
stay out of it. So it often happens that you meet the pushiest people, rather
than the most interesting ones.

"In Europe, you tend to deliver hints that give the impression that you
don't actually want to met anyone at the moment and so on, and those hints are
generally taken. In New York, only a straight 'no' means anything. And I can't
say it, you know. I can't get into the habit of saying, 'Leave me alone.' So
every time I'm there, the first few weeks are really interesting... and then it
builds up again, everyone has my phone number and I'm getting tapes given to me
everywhere. Everywhere I go, people are running up with cassettes. The first
five weeks I was in New York this time I had 180 cassettes given to me. One
hundred and eighty! That's staggering."

About a year ago, you told me that we'd be able to recognise the
first band of the "next wave" simply because they wouldn't ask you to
produce it. They don't seem to have appeared, do they?

"Well, my feelings about rock music at the moment are quite mixed up."

That's why I was surprised when you came back from Asia and wet
straight in to produce the Talking Heads. I'd got the
impression that you were giving it up.

"Well... I nearly didn't, actually, because I'd said to them that I'm
not going to do any more producing. The thing is that I like them so much as
people... I really do... I think they're about the nicest four people I could
ever hope to meet. I like working with them, and I like their music too.

"I thought quite hard about that decision to produce them. I thought
well, if I do this, what will probably happen is that I'll get sucked back into
what I tried to get away from. But then I thought. why should I be so timid
about it? You know, if I've got any strength of will, I'm going to be able to
resist that as well. So I went ahead and did it, and I really enjoyed doing it,
too.

"It was also because on the first record we did together, towards the
end of it, I thought we were really starting to understand how to work together.
Between the five of us we'd developed a group identity, a recording identity. It
shows on that album on the tracks that were done last  the ones that were
least complete going into the studio came out best for me. Now on this album
there were even fewer complete songs, so for me that was obviously an
interesting situation. I want to do their next one, as well... it's about the
only thing I want to do producing-wise. I've had so many offers recently, from
the most weird people... but you mustn't print their names, because people are
very annoyed if they're refused publicly."

"Yes. The thing is that it doesn't seem to be 'world music' any more.
My interest in rock 'n' roll at one time, apart from the simple fact that I
liked it, was that it seemed to me to be the 'world music' of the time... you
know, if there was any folk culture that spread over a lot of the world, it was
rock music. It doesn't seem to be that any more... it's a small-scale operation,
or something.

"But I think it's partly because I've got interested in pop music from
other cultures, particularly North African, and I find that absolutely
beautiful. Arabic singing is so developed that it makes me want to give up...
presumably they don't have a history of harmony, so the whole musical energy
goes into developing the single line, making that more and more interesting. So
I listen to that, and I think nothing we do is anywhere near it, it just isn't
interesting on that level.

"Now, of course, not everything is going to be interesting on every
level... but the other thing I've found myself liking doing  reluctantly,
actually  is the slow, droney, atmospheric things. I really resent this
change tking place, and I think, 'God, who wants this kind of music? Why do I
want to do this?' One is so imbued with the myth of progress that to step
backwards, which is what it looks like to me, is very difficult. Yet that's what
I feel drawn to... so I just have to trust that actually it isn't going
backwards, that in some peculiar way it's forwards."

"One of the continual dilemmas I have is the distinction between the
artist and the artisan. It's only in recent years that the idea has been held
that the artist is the one who innovates and sort of did it on his own. Prior to
that, people were artisans... and they were better or worse artisans. They were
largely told what to do... given specific tasks, and they did them. It was like
a job. One wonders whether rock music is like that, like building a piece of a
cathedral... you're just doing this gargoyle, and you do it well, and nobody
expects great passion from you or anything, and you don't complain about not
feeling great passion all the time. That's your job, you do it.

"I don't know whether it's that or whether it's designing the cathedral
on your own... that kind of 'I got the idea' kind of thing.

"Now the latter one demands the big creative act, while the former one
demands that you just get on with your work. Lately I'm very attracted to the
just-getting-on-with-your-work idea. But of course that's a kind of backward
step, in a way... all right, I'm not going to expect the process of working to
be a constant barrage of thrills, me-on-the-tightrope... it's my job, and if
that happens now and then, it's great. If it doesn't, you carry on nonetheless.

"But again, that's all right if you're working in a position where your
tempo is slow enough, where you don't mind wasting five days on something that
you then chuck away. But the recording studio becomes your real enemy. One may
not mind wasting five days, but wasting £5,000 is quite a different issue.

"The artisan style is attractive because most of the interesting ideas
anyway seem to arise out of a kind of humility about what you're doing. They
don't arise from sitting down and thinking, 'Okay, this is The Big One.' That
was one of the problems with Before And After Science...
there was a wave of expectation, a 'his time has come' kind of thing. The oddity
was that since everyone seemed to think that it had, that record sold better
than any of the others... quite unjustifiably, as far as I'm concerned.

"Again, so many aspects of your personal power are conferred on you...
They have nothing to do with the condition you're in at all. So having that
feeling around made me nervous, and when you're nervous you don't work well. You
naturally stay on a path that you're fairly sure about, that you can defend.

"So there it was... it came out with all this conferred greatness, and
consequently sold as though it were the best of my albums. The sales charts now
indicate a different story, though. What interests me now is that, in terms of
catalogue sales, my records rank exactly in the order of my preference.
Honestly, isn't that wonderful? Discreet Music, Another Green World,
and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy... those are the three that sell
best. That's a real encouragement because Discreet Music is still the
one that has some mystery for me."

When the first Velvet Underground and Roxy Music albums came out
they were the result of people making collisions between things that seemed
incompatible, with all sorts of interesting side-effects. Now all the
implications seem to have been explored as far as possible... all those bands
who form one week and play the next and record the next, they've each taken one
small aspect as far as it can go.

"That's right. In a way, that exploration is really interesting because
each one concludes a particular area. My feeling about most of the new-wave
stuff... well, actually it's also what I felt about the Beatles, that far from
the beginning of something, it was really the end of something. It's saying: we
recognise all these ideas, if you take this one it can go this far, and the next
one can go this far and so on... and really that's the end of that. So now what
do you do?"

Which is why Sgt Pepper was their least interesting work, being the
most explicit.

"Exactly. My feelings too. Things are always least interesting when
they're most clear, in a way, when everybody understands what's going on. I
suppose the quality I've always liked in music is the
sense of being baffled... 'God, I like this, but I don't know why!'

"I was talking to David Bowie about this. We were talking about the
records that first affected us and I said that the first one that I can really
remember being awe-struck by was Get A Job ,by the Silhouettes, because
I'd never heard doo-wop or anything like it, so it was a mystery, and really
thrilling as well. He said it was either Eight Miles High or Mr
Tambourine Man for him, that sound just made him shiver.

"As you get older, you get fewer and fewer of those kind of thrills
because you learn what the context of things is, so I can listen to the
Silhouettes now and say 'Oh yes that's New York doo-wop,' or whatever... and
just being able to place it like that immediately reduces it, knowing that it's
one of many similar things, rather than being this strange singularity. I said
to avoid that I suppose one of the reasons one becomes a composer is that you
want to recreate that thrill for yourself. You want to do something that makes
you say 'God, where did that come from?'

"And he said a great thing. He said 'Sometimes I write lyrics and I
don't really understand them.' I knew exactly what he meant, because sometimes
you do something that is, for want of a better word, meaningful, and yet
you don't know what the meaning is. That's the thrill.

"Now in a way it seems to me that, in rock music, I do know what the
meaning is. I know where it comes from, where it's going to, how it's made, what
the aspirations and philosophy were, and so on. So I suppose I'm still searching
for that sense of mystery, and I find it in a different place now. I found it,
for instance, in those Arabic pop songs. Hearing those for the first time was
just like listening to the Silhouettes."

The rise of pop music coincided with the appearance of certain kinds
of technology which made new effects possible very frequently, didn't it? Maybe
that's the one really special quality about rock 'n' roll that Arabic music or
Western classical music have never possessed...

"You rely on technical innovations a great deal in rock 'n' roll, I
think. In fact I gave a lecture once where I traced a history of rock music
entirely in terms of how recording studios developed. It was an artificial
concept, but actually it turned out to be not such a spurious theory as one
might think at first. Rock music is very much to do with people getting excited
about sounds, and the generation of electronic sounds is obviously to do with
technology. But I did another lecture called 'The Development Of Sound As A
Language', where I wanted to explore the idea that contemporary music, having
freed itself from the finite set of sounds that orchestras and classical
instruments have, was concerned not so much with structure and melody and rhythm
as with the overall sound quality of the track... in much the same a that David
Bowie said he'd never heard a sound like that 12-string guitar.

"Actually, something similar happened in classical music when Steinway
brought out the third pedal on the piano. Debussy wrote a whole set of pieces
for that piano, because the sound was so thrilling to him. Similarly when other
instruments have been invented... of course, in classical music this happened
very slowly, you could expect something as revolutionary as that only maybe
every 30 years. Now in pop music, every year..."

Well, every week at certain points in time...

"That's right. Suddenly there's a whole new area... it's like
discovering a million new colours. Imagine if that happened in painting... there
would be a who1e new breed of painters who'd concentrate on colour. In fact it
did happen in a small way in painting when acrylics came out... but it's such a
commonplace in pop music that people don't even think about it any more. You
don't think that it's a music: that's very much to do with technology.

"Well, now... I didn't think of this before, but I suppose this brings
me to my disenchantment, because I suppose I explored this technology as much as
anyone else... I've made a conscious decision, that's the area I work in, but
the situation is one of diminishing returns, now, because although I can still
go into studio and do things that surprise me, it happens less often on that
level. So now I'm starting to get interested in different uses of technology.

"One example is that I'm interested in multi-channel
sound. It's a very awkward thing to be interested in, because it necessarily
confines you to one particular area. I've been working conceptually  not
practically yet, very much  on the idea of constructing an environment
that has... for instance, if it was this room, it would have a speaker in each
corner, and each one of the speakers would have a different noise coming from
it, so that your position in the room would give you a particular mix.
Technically, it's very easy, but to reproduce it is a different issue, so in a
way that gets you away from making records. It means that you start constructing
environments that people go to, rather than making your records that go to
people. It's a different orientation.

"Video, again... there isn't really a market for video yet, so you're
working in a much smaller area. And I want to take next year
(1980) off, and I want to live in California and experiment with these notions."

But haven't you just taken the best part of a year off?

"I know. I need another one. I've realised that that was just the start
of it."

DIALECT-ICS

"Well, I was stuck, really... in a funny way. Stuck with more offers to
do things than I've ever had before. Some of them were interesting but the
momentum problem was going to arise... It would be 'just one more' and then
'just one more' after that.

"The reason for doing it was that I thought I should spend some time
alone. I spend nearly all my time with other people... what I'm involved in is a
social art, I'm a social kind of person anyway. Yet I find that if I can live
through the initial tedium of my own company, which usually lasts about four
days, I find it very interesting to be alone. I start thinking in a way that's
extremely acute. I'm thinking about different things, I think better and faster,
and I'm much more courageous in what I think because as soon as you forget the
society that you're part of, it's much easier to move against its norms.

"So I thought I had to do it again, because the first time taught me
that I don't want to go to an exotic place to do it. At first I thought, well
obviously the way to do it is really to get out of the West and go somewhere
completely strange. Actually, it was so strange that it was a bit overwhelming,
and I didn't actually do what I wanted to do."

Which was?

"I just wanted to think, and think out a new direction for working."

You didn't plan to work on anything specific?

"No. And I know I won't do it if I'm continually replugging in to the
Old Me, whatever that is. Any identity that you assume has a kind of inertia
beyond the point at which you want to drop it, and it just takes a long while
for that to get out. So my going away was a deliberate celibacy in a way. I took
four books, I think, and a few things on tape, which I selected very
carefully...

[Three of the books which Eno took to Asia were "Beyond
Spiritual Materialism", "Objective Knowledge", and "The
Class System In India". The tapes included music by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,
Bulgarian singing, the slow movements from all Beethoven's late string quartets,
Harold Budd's Obscure album, one cassette featuring 30 seconds from every record
in his "very small' collection, and a BBC record of spoken English
dialects.]

"The spoken English record led to something
quite interesting. I really started getting interested in the way ordinary
people talk, and in the musical aspect of their talking... particularly country
people. In any country dialect, there's a lot of what in scientific terms would
be called 'redundant information', which is thrown in for musical reasons, so
there's a whole bunch of words that keep getting used with the sole function of
making the thing sound nicer.

"I started thinking abut that. Mentally, I'd already given up the idea
of writing songs... one of the reasons being that, after hearing those Arabs,
I'm less interested in the sound of my own voice. God, I feel like a
two-year-old in comparison. So I started thinking that these things  the
dialects  are already music, and you could point to that fact by putting
them in a musical context. You heard the thing with the phone-in conversation..."

[Eno had previously played me a new piece which revolved around a
fragment of speech recorded from the radio in New York, in which a politician,
was replying to a caller.]

"...and I've been working mostly in that direction, mostly taking radio
voices because they're easy to get hold of, and putting them to music. I like
this direction very much... it seems to me a useful area to be involved in. It
satisfies a lot of interesting ideas for me. One is making the ordinary
interesting, which I've always been interested in doing. The other is finding
music where music wasn't supposed to have been. And another is finding a
pre-delivered message, which you put in a context so that the meaning is
changed, or the context amplifies certain aspects of the meaning.

"I haven't done enough to these to be talking so authoritatively, but
sometimes in a single sound-source, like a voice speaking, there's everything
you need. You can find it all there, and you don't have to go to complicated
extremes. I'm now coming back to that position of thinking. Well, sure, there
are all these studios with half a million pounds' worth of equipment, that's one
way of doing it, but another way is taking something very simple and finding it
in that. And it kind of suits me more at the moment to do that.

"I'm sick of working in studios. I want to do
something... well, the truth is that I want to do something painstaking.
That's the thing. The day before yesterday, I went to see Peter
Schmidt, who'd been living alone in Scotland for a while,
painting in water-colours. I was very impressed by one water-colour that's grass
and rocks, and he'd just done all these little blades of grass. I thought 'God,
I really want to abandon myself to something where the time doesn't matter, were
I don't begrudge spending that much time on something, I just sit down and it
becomes almost automatic.'

That sounds more like mental therapy than anything else.

"Yes, it is a therapy, but it's also useful because you can charge
yourself up during the time you're doing something like that. The Japanese
method of doing calligraphy, or so one hears, is to spend almost all of the day
grinding your inks, preparing your paper, cutting your brushes, all of which is
a long ritual with a particular time of the day for each task, and then at the
end of the day you go..." [makes slashing movement] "...and
that's the work done. I've seen those calligraphers at work, and they really do
work fast and seemingly almost faultlessly, and it's as though that long process
of doing all these routine jobs is a way of getting the charge... and the ease
as well. It's a balance of those things.

"Now I think that going into the studio, all you get is the charge... £60
an hour! But you don't get the ease, it's too pressurised a situation to operate
easily in, for me anyway. So I want to be involved in something where it doesn't
really matter if it takes six hours to do something that's only going to be a
tiny detail. I suppose I'm looking for a discipline, really."

THE MIRE OF OPTIONS

Looked at coldly, all that stuff about wanting "time" and "ease"
sounds horribly like wanting to get yourself together in
the country.

"I know. That's why I say it's a frightening move, because one has seen
it happen so many times when what it actually means is the time and ease to be
conceptually lazy. I just have to trust that it won't happen to me. I'm too much
of a worrier for that, I think.

"You see, I've been working in one way for quite a long time, and
another way of working  it seems to me is  is struggling to get out.
But it just doesn't have the time to emerge. This is indicated by the disparity
in what I make and what I listen to... those two things tend to be quite far
apart. Now I think maybe they should get a bit closer.

"When you're in the studio, the things that convince you that you're
achieving something are the things that give you this charge of energy. When
you're doing something like Music For Airports, it's so laid back that
it's hard to convince yourself that you're doing anything. It's not until you
take it home and realise that you really enjoy it, and that that's the mood you
want from music... something as slow as that.

"I have a theory that, as a maker you tend to put in twice as much as
you need as a listener. It's the symptom of contemporary production. That's why
old records are interesting, because they don't have that problem a lot of the
time. With the facilities that you have today, you tend to plug every hole...
you're always looking for that charge, so you put more and more in to get it.
But as a listener you're much less demanding... you can take things that are
much simpler, much more open, and much slower. It's often happened that I've
made a piece and ended up slowing it down by as much as half. Discreet Music is an example: that's half the speed at
which it was recorded.

"One of my theories about why new-wave music gets so fast is that you
get the charge from it at that speed. But the thing about rock music is that it
gives the illusion of being incredibly urgent and fast-changing, so your overall
time-scale tends to get more and more compressed... to the point at which you're
thinking, 'Fuck me, a week? I can't afford to take a week off... I've got to
have a record out within two months or everyone will have forgotten me.' I don't
like living at that speed very much. Well... I get a charge from it as well..."

It might be nice to be able to vary it...

"That's right. You want to be ale to live on a number of different
time-scales at once. At present, my life is all in that fifth-gear time-scale.
It's partly because I don't have a place to live. I haven't really had a place
that I regard as home for the past three or four years, I'm always shifting
about from place to place, so the only continuum that I have is my work. And I
think that if you want a realistic continuum in your work, it has to reflect one
that's in the rest of your life. But the rest of my life is all over the place,
especially in New York.

"When I'm there, every day is unique and quite different. I get up at a
different time, I eat breakfast at a new place, or not, I see different people,
work with other different kinds of people, on different kinds of music, or
video, or this or that, or giving lectures or writing or whatever. Well, that's
all very admirable in one way... one flatters oneself with the image of being
the Renaissance Man or something, but I really would like to be
somewhere for a while. The central problem of my life."

So are you trying to deliver an album on time
before you go away this time?

"Well, actually, no. I was... but I just abandoned a whole lot of work.
I thought it was turning out to be 'more of the same', and I don't... I even
think it would've been a good record, it's not that, but I think what I might
deliver is an EP, because think I've got enough material to make an album with
four really good tracks on it, therefore I've got enough for a truly great EP.
So that will be my output for this year."

What aspect of your work do they represent?

'Three of them were made in New York (with David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, David
Van Tieghem and others), and one was made here. But they're all the phone-voice
type things, so they're a coherent body of work. The first in that series was
really the thing I did with Snatch, 'RAF', on the B-side of King's Lead Hat.
I like that very much I was even thinking of re-releasing it on this EP.
Listening to it now, I really think it's got something. John Peel played it
once, and he said a very nice thing about it, that it reminded him of John
Heartfield's collages. I thought that very nice company to be placed in."

Can you see any specific projects to be done when you come back from
California?

"The truth of it is that I'm in a dilemma. In what the Buddhists call
the Mire of Options, where it seems that every possibility is open to me. Not
that I don't know which one to do, but the one that pulls me most strongly is
the one that everyone else is least interested in. So I know I won't do it as
long as I'm in the company of other people who're always encouraging all the
other aspects of what I do. Going away is just to see what'll become of this
niggling undercurrent if it's left to its own devices."

THE THRILLING GAME

Aside from your diminishing interest in rock music generally, I
can't imagine that you've been particularly captivated
by what's been in going on in Britain over the past couple of years.

"Not really. There seem to have been so many false prophets here... and
there too, actually. It's obvious to me that everyone desperately wants The New
Thing to happen, and yet... so, consequently, you get these poor innocent people
who suddenly get this status conferred on this in a week: suddenly this
is the band, those are the ones! And, of course, it's bad news
for them, too."

What do you think about Gary Numan?

"Well, let me think ... [long pause] ... I heard about him a
lot before I ever got to hear one of his records. I heard all these descriptions
of him, and... I must be quite honest... I was a bit disappointed when I heard
the albums. Again, it seems like a conclusion, you know? If you take all these
ingredients and put them together, they're all quite attractive... I really
didn't like it a lot. I didn't dislike it, either, but I suppose I was
disappointed. When you see three albums in the Top 20, you think something must
be happening ...

There really seems to be a contemporary update of what you and Kraftwerk and
Bowie have been doing for the past few years. All those people hanging around
Blitz in Covent Garden...

"Yeah. I can't get too thrilled abut it, actually. I think it's
possible that... rock music has to be made by young people. I've never thought
that before, but I do now. I think it requires enthusiasm, energy, and speed...
natural speed. Jon Hassell put it well: he said that the
tendency of rock music in the past few years has been towards irony, in the
sense that it's either pastiche or parody... deliberate poking fun at rock
itself. The Tubes are a paradigm of that. He also said, and I agree with him,
'What I'm really interested in is its sincerity'... which is the
opposite pole from that.

"I really want to believe that the music has resonances below being a
kind of thrilling game. Consequently this idea of Fourth World Music that
Hassell has, of making something that's culturally distinct, so you're not sure
where it came from and that could be listened to by people from lots of other
cultures, is an interesting aspiration.

"But the other thing is that this music will be vulnerable, in a way,
because it's sincere. You can't attack something that's in the ironic mode,
because it's already taken that step by attacking itself. I was listening to the
new Zappa album, and I thought, 'This guy is so talented, and such a berk at the
same time.' He just can't stop not taking himself seriously... he refuses, he's
frightened of taking himself seriously because as soon as he does, he knows he's
going to be attacked.

"It's true: as soon as you drop that witty clown attitude, you expose
yourself... because you're saying, 'This is actually what I really believe in.'
Zappa is a paradigm of somebody who never takes that position. He writes
beautiful tunes sometimes, which he destroys in the next bar."

CRITIQUE

A lot of people might say that you and Roxy Music were responsible
for inventing that sort of self-referential
rock, what one might call "metarock".

"I think so, too. I suppose my disenchantment with that, and with some
of what I did, was from the same feeling. In fact I suppose that's a good way of
making the division between the work I'm doing. There are two separate strands
going on: sometimes I describe them as 'the slow stuff' and 'the stuff with a
beat', but actually a more accurate division would be 'the ironic stuff' and
'the sincere stuff'. The 'ironic' mode would be about distorting the currency of
rock music in some way so that it's a very conscious working within a tradition,
and it relies on people having a good knowledge of that tradition to understand
it."

Most records that go out these days from new bands don't work at all
unless you know a great deal about the tradition of rock music.

"Yes, it really is culturally inbred music now. One of the great things
about rock music has been that what comes out actually is an overall sound for
the times. I heard 'Da Doo Ron Ron' on the radio today, and I thought, 'God,
that's so identifiably of its period, everything about it has the feeling of
that time... and if I'd never heard it before, I'd be able to place it in time
very accurately.' With that placement, you can place a whole lot of... well,
lifestyle attitudes that go with it.

"But of course we didn't have people saying that the Crystals were the
saviours of Western culture at that time. Two aspects of this go hand in hand:
just as Roxy and Bowie and others produced the metarock thing, so the critics
were equally responsible... because they all wanted to say, 'Look, this is more
than just a game... there's some Big Deal going on here'."

It would be interesting to know what would've happened to music if a
lot of people hadn't felt that way in the early Seventies. But it isn't just
critics who think like that. A lot or musicians seem to operate as critics in a
sense. In fact that's virtually what metamusicians are.

"That's right. They're already playing the part of the critic as well
when they make the work."

"Yes... each piece of music stands as a re-evaluation of rock music to
date. It says 'This it is okay, this isn't.' Re-evaluation is an idea that
interests me a lot. It's normally assumed that the artist is the one who
innovates... but actually, if you look at what artists do, maybe four per cent
of their work is innovation, then there are a whole lot of other things.

"For instance, they ignore a whole lot of available options. They
re-evaluate a whole lot of other things that already existed from the whole
history of their medium, and they choose to repeat these ones. They
definitely condemn other aspects. So 'ignoring', 're-evaluating' and
'condemning'... three different ways of dealing with your history to date and
re-using that history. And I think what's problematic about criticism is that it
always wants to concentrate on that little four per cent (of innovation) without
seeing the hole of the rest of the work.

"I wouldn't be a critic, for sure. I couldn't do it. I would hate to
hurt people's feelings. I really would."